The National Journal Group has changed their online strategy: their three main publications are now integrated in a single website; more free content will be available, mainly breaking news and analysis, while deeper policy analysis will stay behind the paywall. A brand new mobile website is also part of that new offer, along with an iPad application which is still in development but expected soon.

DevMotion helped NJG integrate and customize Nstein’s WCM, and developped some specialized and key features to support their new needs (to name a few):

• a paywall system, over which sits an interface layer for the iPad and Iphone applications;
• a semantic faceted search module leveraging extracted linguistic meta data;
• an import module to ingest on-going feeds (NewsML);
• an export module to export / syndicate content to partners;
• a user tracking mechanism.

You can see the result of all the hard work from everybody involved in the project at www.nationaljournal.com.

First part of the problem was documented: I needed to create custom options on a product, and I’ve been able to find a couple of examples. Second part was tricky: I needed to specify a different title for each store the product was related to. For this part, I found almost nothing useful.

I spent some time reading Magento’s API documentation (here I’m talking about PHP API, not the SOAP or XMLRPC API), trying things, var_dumping and print_r-ing objects, and so on. After a couple hours of head scratching, I finally got it working.

In fact, the solution is pretty simple. First, you need to have the ID of the product that will own the option. Either you load an existing product, or you create a new one and then save it (so its ID is generated); that’s the $product variable. Then let’s just create the option object, initialize its properties, bind it to its product and save it:

$option = Mage::getModel('catalog/product_option');
$opt->setTitle('Color');
$opt->setType('field');
$opt->setPriceType('fixed');
$opt->setPrice(0);
$opt->setProductId($product->getId());
$opt->save();

Now you have a new text field option, with its default title being Color. Now let’s say you have a French store and you need to assign the title Couleur for that store. You simply need to change the option’s current store ID, set the French title and save:

$opt->setStoreId(Mage::app()->getStore('french')->getId());
$opt->setTitle('Couleur');
$opt->save();

(here I loaded the store ID using the store’s code property)

Same thing applies for values when using multi-valued options. Here I’ve got a drop_down option offering various sizes, and I need to add a new size named Very Small. Similar as before, you need to have an existing product and option ($product and $option variables):

$value = Mage::getModel('catalog/product_option_value');
$value->setTitle('Very Small');
$value->setPriceType('fixed');
$value->setPrice(0);
$value->setProductId($product->getId());
$value->setOptionId($option->getId());
$value->save();

Then, let’s change the value’s store ID, set the French title Très Petit and save:

$value->setStoreId(Mage::app()->getStore('french')->getId());
$value->setTitle(utf8_encode('Très Petit'));
$value->save();

In case you were wondering: the utf8_encode allows Magento to correctly digest accented characters.

Here is a small transcript of the RFC.

Why do we need Class Metadata?

Frameworks in general rely on metadata information in order to correctly work. They can use it for many purposes:

• phpUnit Providing meta functionality for test cases, examples: @dataProvider for test data iteration, @expectedException for catching exceptions, etc.
• phpDoc Providing useful information for API generation, examples: @author, @param, @return, etc.
• Doctrine For Object-Relational mapping, examples: @Entity, @OneToOne, @Id, etc.
• Zend Framework Server classes Used to automate mappings for XML-RPC, SOAP, etc.
• Others One clear thing that comes to my mind is Validation, Functional Behavior injection (which could take advantage of Traits), etc. Also, any Framework could take advantage of it somehow.

So, any meta mapping injection could be easily achieved via the implementation of a centralized Annotations support. Source : http://wiki.php.net/rfc/annotations

For a full description of the RFC, please go here : http://wiki.php.net/rfc/annotations

Pierrick Charron (Core PHP Developer and Co-Founder at DevMotion) has worked on a Zend Engine patch to add native Annotation support within PHP.

Patch can be downloaded from here : http://www.adoy.net/php/Annotations.diff